I’ve been perusing local “for sale” listings for Sony rear-projection LCD TVs.  Built in the mid 2000s, most of these sets failed due to an overheated blue LCD module (and often, the accompanying polairzer) within the optical block.  The symptoms are blue dots (pixels) that appear around the edges of the picture, sometimes accompanied by a yellow haze.

The overheating is often seen after the original lamp is replaced–there is a fan-powered ventilation system within the optical block which gets gunked up with dust over time, restricting airflow.  As the bulb is used over the years, it dims, making the block run slightly cooler; replace the bulb with a new one, and the original heat is back.  Combine that with the poorer ventilation and you’ll see a failure in the LCD panel where the pixels burn out or, in more severe cases, the polarizer over the LCD panel also distorts and gets damaged.

How common was the problem?  There were a handful of class-action lawsuits against Sony for the early failures of these sets and, for a time, they offered a discount on certain replacement flat screen LCD TVs to owners of these sets.  Peruse the local Craigslist in any major city and you’ll likely see at least one or two listings for sets with this problem.

Why should I care about it?  I am seeing a lot of these sets listed for large sums of money.  Thing is, consumers today are educated, and can easily plug the model number into a Google search and find out all of the information about the set, including specifications and complaints.  As such, someone asking $250 to $500 for one of these LCD TVs that is failed, or beginning to fail, is never going to see that amount.  Three weeks ago, I saw a final Craigslist posting for a really nice KDF-60XS955 that had the blue dots: either pick the set up within two days for $15, or it was going to the curb on trash night.  This was after two months of starting at a price around $50, dropping it every couple of weeks.  Other sets go unsold, working or non-working, at $100 or higher.

Bottom line: these sets just aren’t selling.  Even repaired, they are not worth much, as the failure will simply happen again in a few years’ time.  And the parts for these are no longer being made.  Basically, an expensive time bomb.  The good thing is that for someone who is reasonably handy with electronics, these can be repaired for a modest cost and brought back to life for a few more years.  Replacement optical blocks can cost anywhere from just under $100 to $350, or the LCD panels can be purchased and replaced, along with the polarizers.

In an upcoming post, we’ll be tackling just such a project, replacing the optical block in one of these sets, along with dismantling the old optical block to analyze which part overheated, and to harvest other components we could use for future repairs.

Until then…buyer beware!

As many know, I really do not care for the sound of digital.  Not all digital–DSD (via SACD) is fairly nice, and higher resolution files tend to reduce the characteristics of digital sound which I do not care for.  With standard CD-grad digital, however, I can hear the low resolution.  At higher frequencies, a raw digital signal looks like a sawtooth in comparison to the analog original…and I have heard this, especially when in close proximity to a speaker.  The highs have a “buzzy” sort of sound to them that no amount of digital filtering or dithering can cover up.

I was relying on the DAC (digital to analog converter) built into my Pioneer Elite DV-45A for all these years.  As it is a “premium” player, I had expected somewhat better sound out of it.  SACDs do sound nice, as do some of my DVD-Audio titles.  Yet I found that as I was listening to CD digital, I was unconsciously grinding my teeth.  Not only that, digital seemed to always have a constant “glare” in the upper mids that seemed to make the sound cold and lifeless on many titles.  And the older the CD, the worse the sound–many of those early reissue titles sound absolutely horrid, many unlistenable.

The Musical Fidelity X10-D tube buffer stage did help the digital output greatly, but that was one of two steps I was contemplating.  The other step was to get a mid-range DAC to try in the system.  And now that I have a Cambridge Audio DacMagic on hand, I have heard what a DAC can do for a system.

The DacMagic is not without its quirks.  And, I am having issues with sources of my own that are preventing me from hearing all of my PCM digital through the DAC.  (For example, the DV-45A does not output 88.2kHz digital through the digital outputs!)  The WDTV Live Streaming Media Player I purchased also turned out to output signals only at 44.1kHz or 48kHz, so I still have no way to listen to my high-res FLAC files.  Shameful.  I can go as high as 96kHz/24-bit using an outboard USB sound device on the laptop, but that defeats the purpose of having a media player that handles these issues simply.

Anyway, that debacle will be solved in a future installment.  For now, back to the DacMagic.  My main question in all this: would I be able to hear a difference?

Turns out, I do hear a difference.  Comparing the output of the DV-45A to the DacMagic, the DV-45A has a thinner and less musical sound.  The DacMagic is fuller and has more body, especially on primitive CD-level sampling rates.  It does a credible job of getting inside the music and making CDs (and 44.1kHz/16-bit FLAC files) sound better than they have any right to sound.

Is the combination of the X10-D tube buffer and DacMagic DAC too much?  No!  If anything, the two are complementing each other.  The DacMagic smooths out and makes the digital more musical, where the X10-D adds a certain fullness, warmth and imaging quality that makes the music bloom beyond the speakers.  The two sound very nice together, and it is understandable that some companies offer a DAC with a tube output buffer stage–I find it to be a very pleasant and musical case of synergy.

Music through the DAC/buffer combination often create moments where you are distracted by the music, stopping to listen to something you may not have noticed in a familiar piece of music.  Some vocals over the combination are almost goosebump-inducing now, and acoustic music really shines.  Something like the Bill Evans album Waltz For Debby (which I actually play from an audio DVD at 24-bit/96kHz) really gives you the experience of being at the Village Vanguard when it was being taped.  Michael Franks’ voice is also in top form; on The Art Of Tea, you get the fullness of his voice without the “chestiness” that muddies the sound.  Recordings that could lean toward sibilance are tamed down into listenability.  Even older recordings, such as Cal Tjader’s Several Shades of Jade, bring out the detail and space between all of the percussion instruments.

While the DacMagic is good, I am looking to upgrade to a DAC that will take a full 192kHz/24-bit and 176.4kHz/24-bit source.  Cambridge has newer products that can handle it, and the Schiit Bifrost is also a nice unit in a similar price range that can tackle all those sampling rates.

After that, I need to tackle finding a media player than can play back the pure FLAC files as is, without any downsampling or digital processing (including a volume adjustment in a media player).  Short of playing music from a laptop, I do not even know if I can find what I need at a price I can afford.  In other words, for simple processing of FLAC files into a direct S/PDIF signal, there should be minimal expense involved (not something in the four figure range, in other words).

It’s been awhile since I’ve pulled out stacks of CDs to sample, and this tube buffer/DAC combination has had me doing it.  The whole experience so far shows that I really could stand to do major upgrades to all of my components, but the budget is not there as of yet.  If a player like the Oppo BDP-105 had a suitable analog output, I might be tempted to bypass using an external DAC. And rather than a tube buffer stage, I might be inclined to find an Audio Research SP-10 or SP-11, both of which are tube-driven.  But for now, I have a sound that is more listenable than back when I started on this mini-quest.  Mission (somewhat) accomplished!

The epilogue: if I had to recommend a component to improve digital sound noticeably, what would I recommend from the components I’ve tried?  It’s true that the DAC made noticeable improvement, but the tube buffer is actually what gave me the biggest boost in listening pleasure, along with having the advantage of being able to try different sets of tubes to affect the sound.  The buffer just gave the whole presentation a lift: imaging, body, fullness, properties I felt were somewhat lost with digital playback.

Tubes?  Yes, tubes. Valves.  Vacuum tubes.  The stuff that your grandfather’s hi-fi had inside its mysterious guts.  Tubes have also been praised for decades for having a certain amount of musicality that solid state devices could not touch.  There are still more than a handful of audiophile components that use tubes, although most are priced into the stratosphere; nice sounding tubes are not cheap either.  Consider that my budget is currently “ground level” as compared to stratosphere, and you can imagine that my dream of ever owning tubes would likely never come to fruition.

However, there are ways to get that “tube” sound into your system.  I had no problem with my analog playback.  In fact, I was pretty much avoiding digital over the past couple years due to how unpleasant it sounds.  The idea of trying either a new DAC (digital to analog converter) or a tube buffer stage somewhere in my system was in the back of my head.  I perused a lot of the eBay listings for examples of either, but upon discussing it with an audiophile pal of mine, he decided to mail me one of his extra Musical Fidelity X10-D tube buffers.  He had just purchased a spare on eBay, put a new set of tubes in it (more on those shortly), and shipped it my way to evaluate.

I have had the buffer plugged in now for at least two weeks straight–it uses minimal power when idle yet, keeping the tubes warm, it tends to “lock in” when the components have all stabilized.  Surprisingly, the outside of the case hardly feels warm at all when the unit is idle.  Even after a listening session of a few hours, the outside is only mildly warm.

Connecting the X10-D into my system was a challenge.  At first I had it between the CD player and preamp, but now I have it in the external processor loop of the preamp (a Hafler DH-101) in order to use it with more of my sources, including vinyl.

I did have reservations.  I did not want something to act as a Band Aid for what I feel are shortcomings in digital reproduction.  That, and I did not even know if I would be able to hear a difference.  My hearing (and my patience) is not what it used to be.  But along with the tube buffer and a handful of other changes, I was able to change the sound of my system for the better.

Finally, I have been able to hear what all the fuss is about: tubes sound niiiiiiiiice!  The effect is subtle.  A casual listener might not even hear the difference, and I admit the difference is not something that reaches out and hits you over the head immediately.  It is subtle.  The pleasures unfold the longer you listen.  You start noticing things. You notice that the soundstage blooms beyond the speakers where it never used to, yet other images between the speakers tend to sound more localized.  (A sound dead-center between both speakers comes at you strongly as dead-center now.)  There is also a fullness and body to the music I hadn’t heard previously: there seems to be more “meat” to the sound now.  With the tube buffer being a new concept to me (tubes…in an audiophile system, not an old dusty hi-fi in my parents’ basement), I’ve found myself trying familiar CDs to see how much difference the buffer makes.  I do notice that a lot of rock studio recordings see minimal improvement, while earlier rock/pop recordings, and especially vocal and acoustic music, really make the tubes glow.

That leads us to tube rolling.  As of the date of this writing, I have not yet had any alternate tubes to try, but the current tubes are a pair of National (Matsushita) 7DJ8 tubes that sound quite nice in the system.  They are a little on the bright side before they are broken in, but tame down nicely once they have had a few hours on them.  This tube is a recent find; it may be worth finding more of these before the price heads up to that stratosphere I mentioned earlier.  My loaner pal says that his preferred tube in this buffer is the Amperex 7308 JAN (joint army-navy) tube with gold plate pins.  This buffer works with a variety of tubes, as you can tell:  6DJ8, 6922, ECC88, E88C, 7DJ8, 7308, E188CC, and likely a few others.

The point of entry for this model of buffer is between $100 and $150, depending on whether or not good tubes are included.  Count on maybe $50 or more for a good matched pair of tubes, and budget for an extra pair of interconnects as well.